I often run into people (especially those early in their learning journeys) who suffer from massive imposter syndrome and feelings of being mediocre. I find myself giving the same versions of the following advice, so I thought I’d take the time to write it down with a bit more coherency in one place.
There is no great shortcut to getting good at something. You need to work hard at it, make a ton of mistakes, and learn from those mistakes. That’s it, this is the entire playbook.
But this playbook is really hard to follow for one very specific reason. And this is that your ability to critique things is vastly better than your ability to create things. It’s easy to gauge your early work as mediocre, get dejected and quit. Ira Glass expresses this beautifully in the following video.
The way around this conundrum is to truly internalise a couple of facts.
The first of these is that you are not especially mediocre (even though it can often feel this way when you compare yourself to others). Most people are pretty mediocre at most things and literally everything you see around you was made up by someone no smarter or capable than you. You can create and improve upon anything.
The second thing — and this is perhaps more important — is that experiencing failures as you try and giving your brain time to learn from them is the only way to mastery. I’m not saying this in some philosophical sense, I am expressing this as a scientific fact. Research indicates that experiencing errors trigger neuroplasticity. i.e. they trigger chemicals that inform your neural circuitry that they have to change.
So summarising these two facts, my advice to you is this. Instead of comparing yourself to others and thinking of them as exceptional (and yourself as mediocre), use them as an existence proof to see that if they can do it, so can you. Then, try to cast experiencing (many, many) failures as a positive part of your learning journey. This will keep you going as you get better and better at whatever you are attempting.
Don’t let your fear of being imperfect stop you from getting good at things you care about.